Waldorf press release:
FOREST CITY – For more than a decade, Waldorf College coach Kent Anderson made his presence known on the sidelines of the German Football League (GFL).
Winning a combined eight national championships with three different teams in a 15-year span helped solidify a legacy for Anderson, who was recently named to the GFL Hall of Fame.
“It’s certainly an honor,” Anderson said.
A native of Bloomfield, Anderson played NCAA Division I football at Iowa State University and was a three-year letter winner as a wide receiver and special teams player for the Cyclones.
After graduating from Iowa State in 1985, Anderson worked in the private sector for six years in sales. He then spent two years at the University of North Carolina as a graduate assistant for the football program under Mack Brown, who won the 2005 national title at the University of Texas and is now president of the American Football Coaches Association (AFCA). While coaching the Tar Heels’ wide receivers and offensive line, Anderson was part of a team that won the 1993 Peach Bowl.
Anderson served as an assistant coach at NCAA Division III’s Simpson College for one season, working with wide receivers and coordinating the team’s passing game.
In 1994, Anderson arrived in Germany on a three-month contract as assistant coach of the Braunschweig Lions. He planned to stay for the summer, but was offered the head coaching job. Accepting the position, Anderson remained in Germany until 2009.
“I loved the culture,” Anderson said. “I got immersed in the culture.”
During the 1994 season in Braunschweig, Anderson became the first coach in GFL history to take his team to the playoffs as a first-year coach.
Attaining success in the GFL, Anderson won national championships while coaching Braunschweig, the Hamburg Blue Devils and Berlin Adler. He also made two national title game appearances with the Kiel Baltic Hurricanes.
Waldorf associate head coach Elzie Anderson played three seasons under Kent Anderson. In 1998, Elzie Anderson was named the German Bowl Most Valuable Player and was Europe’s Defensive Lineman of the Year in 1999.
As a coach in the GFL, Anderson compiled a 182-62-5 record and was a six-time national coach of the year.
“I enjoyed it,” Anderson said. “It was certainly a great experience.”
Anderson said German football doesn’t really differ from the American game since the rules are identical to the collegiate level. With the GFL being a corporate-driven league, the biggest difference is that sponsor logos are plastered all over uniforms.
“It looked like the Formula One of football uniforms,” Anderson said.
While coaching in Germany, Anderson also oversaw many of his teams’ football operations, including recruiting and scouting players from the NCAA, NFL and Europe, developing corporate sponsorship and marketing programs, budget operation and personnel decisions. He spent time off the field as a motivational speaker for a number of German businesses. Anderson, who’s fluent in German, also hosted a television show on Sat.1, a major network in Germany.
“I did a couple of things there that I would’ve never had the opportunity to do here,” Anderson said.
In 2005, Anderson met his wife, Friederike. They were united in marriage in 2008 and have two daughters, Laena, 4, and Mila, 1.
From working on the gridiron to enjoying travels across Europe during the offseason, Anderson made the most of his time abroad.
“It was nothing but positives,” Anderson said. “You can experience another culture and really get immersed in it. That was a great opportunity for me.”
For Anderson, the goal was to return to the United States once he established himself as a coach and made an impact in the GFL. He did just that, making 11 national championship game appearances in 15 seasons.
“Fortunately, we succeeded and I decided it was time to come back,” Anderson said.
Returning to the Hawkeye State, Anderson was head coach at Iowa Wesleyan College for two seasons before arriving at Waldorf. In 2011, he helped the Tigers record the most wins since 1997.
Anderson’s ties to the German football scene still run deep. He has several colleagues who currently coach there and he returns to visit family and friends every summer.
Through Anderson’s connections, he remains active recruiting the nation he called home for the better part of two decade. Returners Dustin Wilke, Julian Ampaw and incoming transfers Benjamin Mau and Joshua Sauren are German players currently on Waldorf’s roster.
“It’s a good market,” Anderson said. “There’s a lot of talent there.”
Darion Neal, a 2015 Waldorf graduate, now plays for the GFL’s Passau Pirates.
Today, Anderson continues to apply the lessons he learned while coaching in Germany. Early in his career, his teams didn’t always have all of the necessary facilities, equipment and resources
“You really had to do some outside-of-the-box thinking,” Anderson said. “You had to think outside of the box on how to use your personnel and how to structure your practices because a lot of the players had jobs.”
“In some ways, it’s a lot like small college football,” Anderson added. “You have to be resourceful. I learned very much how to be resourceful there.”
Landing corporate sponsors, attracting spectators to the stadium on game day and helping them understand the sport required insight from Anderson.
“We had to really be clever with marketing to get people to come,” Anderson said. “I was heavily involved with that in the offseason.”
From coaching in the GFL to making the move to the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), there’s still a give-and-take relationship between coaches and players.
“There’s a mutual respect for each other’s existence,” Anderson said.
Just six years removed from coaching in the GFL, the now-Hall-of-Fame coach is set to begin his fourth season at Waldorf. Anderson leads a Warriors team that ranked eighth in total offense in the NAIA last year with 450 yards per game.
“There are not a lot of people who have coached in Germany and then came back here,” Anderson said. “Trying to do something on two separate continents certainly is special and we’ll try to get something done here.”